Deliciously Healthy Bottle Gourd (Dudhi) Subzi

Today’s recipe is for two wonderful friends – one gave me the recipe, and the other wants to cook it.

Now I love most types of squash, but I had rarely ever cooked with the bottle gourd (dudhi or lauki), a delicious variety of squash that’s very popular in Indian cooking. Even when I found an Asian supermarket in my area that sold it, I just wasn’t motivated enough to pick it up, take it home, and cook it.

Enter Navami, my intrepid social worker friend who, while staying with us for a weekend, told me about the bottle gourd’s amazing health properties. According to Ayurveda, the ancient Indian science of holistic healing, bottle gourd is a diuretic, is great for your digestive system, and even has cholesterol-lowering properties. Being a sucker for anything that’s supposed to be good for me (I know it sounds weird, but that’s just me!) I dragged Navami to the Asian supermarket and, under her eagle eye, picked up a beautifully pale-green bottle gourd.

Next came the prep- Navami passed on to me her family’s simple but delicious recipe, which I tweaked just slightly to suit my family’s tastes. It was so tasty, I couldn’t resist buying the bottle gourd each time I went to the Asian store.

This is where my other friend, Sharon, comes in. Sharon is a fearless reporter at a newspaper where I once worked myself. She travels regularly to Iraq and other parts of the world, digging up amazing stories. Sharon loves Goan food, and dreams of writing a cookbook about cuisine from that part of the world some day.

Anyway, Sharon and I went to the Indian store this past weekend, and I had a blast explaining to her the role of various spices, condiments and ingredients used in Indian cooking. Being a Sunday evening, we had slim pickings when it came to the fresh produce section, but Sharon seemed intrigued by the bottle gourd.

I promised at the time to send her the recipe, so here it is. It takes minutes to put together, and is utterly delicious eaten with some rice and lentils or just a chapati or two.

Comments

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We eat bottle gourd regularly in my mom’s house, but my hubby is not too fond of it. So either i make it with chana or make koftas or paranthas ut of it. But ur recipe looks delicious. I have doodhi at home. will make this .

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I had to omit a couple of paragraphs and sentences from your blog for two reasons – any mention of the blog shows you wrote it for your blog and not the site and the blog was a little long. Let me know if I deleted any text that you really would prefer be on there.

hi Vaishali, I tried this subzi and it turned out sooooo tasty, thank you so much for sharing the recipe! This is such a quick to make rcp for weekday cooking, no chopping of onion/tom 😉thanks again for a keeper rcp!